5 ETF Areas of Last Week

Wall Street delivered a moderate performance last week. The S&P 500 added about 0.5%, the Dow Jones lost about 0.6%, and the Nasdaq-100 surged about 1.1% last week as growth stocks rallied on hopes that the Fed will stay put in the September meeting, instead of prior apprehensions of a rate hike.

Easing Inflation Cools Fed Rate-Hike Bets

Expectations of another Federal Reserve rate hike have cooled, following the latest inflation data. The annual inflation rate in the United States slowed for a second successive month to 3.4% in July 2026 from 3.5% in June, in line with expectations.

The impact of the energy shock caused by the war with Iran continued to ease. On a monthly basis, the CPI rose 0.1% as expected, rebounding from a 0.4% decline in June. Core CPI, which excludes volatile food and energy prices, rose 0.2% sequentially (following a flat reading in June) and 2.5% year over year, down from 2.6% in June, per Trading Economics (read: 5 ETFs to Benefit From Cooling Inflation in the Near Term).

The chances of the Fed keeping interest rates unchanged at its September meeting have now risen to 66.9%, up from 51.5% a month ago, per CME FedWatchTool (at the time of writing).

The benign inflation report came shortly after July's disappointing jobs data, which showed an unexpected loss of 23,000 nonfarm jobs. The combination of softer inflation and a weakening labor market has reduced the urgency for the Fed to raise interest rates at its September meeting.

NVIDIA's $500B AI Push

NVIDIA NVDA announced last week that it had entered into memorandums of understanding with Apollo Global Management (APO), BlackRock (BLK), Blackstone (BX), Brookfield (BAM), Goldman Sachs (GS) and KKR (KKR) to establish financing platforms aimed at supporting its customers, as quoted on CNBC (read: Does NVIDIA's $500B AI Push Open a New Opportunity for Financial ETFs?).

Winning ETFs in Focus

Against this backdrop, below we highlight a few winning ETFs of last week.

Opportunistic Trader ETF WZRD – Up 55.4%

The fund offers exposure to multiple option strategies aimed toward capturing upside and mitigating downside risk. Most ETFs currently in the market use just one option strategy (covered calls). The fund’s expense ratio is 1.07%, and it yields 28.08% annually.

Breakwave Tanker Shipping ETF BWET – Up 28.8%

The Breakwave Tanker Shipping ETF provides long exposure to the crude oil tanker shipping market through a portfolio of near-dated futures contracts on indices that measure the cost of shipping crude oil. The fund’s expense ratio is 3.50%.

Roundhill Neocloud ETF NCLD – Up 18.7%

GPU-as-a-Service (GPUaaS) allows businesses and developers to access powerful GPUs through the cloud without buying and maintaining costly hardware. Specialized providers focused entirely on this model are known as neoclouds.

New neocloud ETF NCLD offers focused exposure to CoreWeave, Nebius and other AI players. CoreWeave surged 14.3% last week, boosting this new ETF (read: CoreWeave Surges on Upbeat Q2: ETFs in Focus).

Tema Memory ETF DISK – Up 16.8%

Memory stocks bounced back lately, with SanDisk SNDK gaining about 36.2% last week.  Memory stocks have been bouncing back recently because investors are rotating back into AI-infrastructure plays after a sharp midsummer sell-off, and because of fresh catalysts — strong earnings/guidance from key memory names, and new AI-focused memory partnerships. AI-driven demand for DRAM/NAND (especially high-bandwidth memory) also remains tight.

Roundhill Memory ETF DRAM – Up 15.8%

The Roundhill Memory ETF seeks to provide capital appreciation. The fund is heavy on Micron, SK Hynix and Samsung. The memory market is moving toward a more contractually locked, proof-to-cyclicality, and higher sustained margins model. This is why memory ETFs have been gaining lately after a summer lull. 

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This article originally published on Zacks Investment Research (zacks.com).

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